A reporter for an NBC affiliate in Baltimore who inserted a racist remark into a video clip of FOX News’ John Gibson and posted it on YouTube is no longer employed by the station, FOXNews.com has learned.

Since all white people consider themselves to be “creative,” they are constantly in need of products and accessories that will allow them to capture their thoughts. One of the more popular products in recent years has been the Moleskine notebook.

It used to be that credit-card companies lured customers with cash rewards. Now American Express Co. is paying to get rid of them. The card issuer is offering selected customers a $300 AmEx prepaid gift card if they pay off their balances and close their accounts.

And why, you might ask, do they do this seemingly unbusinesslike thing?

I am also willing to bet that we see a whole lot more of this if Congress gives bankruptcy judges the ability to cram down mortgages in Chapter 13, as they almost certainly will. The provision is going to attract a lot more people into bankruptcy, and those people are going to shed a lot of their unsecured (read: credit card) debt. I’d expect that credit card lenders are already desperately trying to weed out those most likely to enter Chapter 13.

If you go into a restaurant and order a cheese pizza that arrived there frozen, the FDA is in charge of inspecting it, the AP says. But if it was frozen and has pepperoni on it, that would be the Agriculture Department’s problem. Meantime, both the FDA and the Agriculture Department would be responsible if the pizza were made fresh at the restaurant and the pizza had meat on it.

There’s more. Some fish is inspected by the Commerce Department, the AP explains. And while the FDA handles most food-safety work, at least 15 government agencies play some sort of role.

Government agencies, like labor unions, are hell on wheels when it comes to guarding their turf — unless it’s a disaster, and then their fingers are out and pointing.

This is why Christian theology is so difficult to grasp: Its basic premise is, uniquely, that God isn’t just like us, but amazingly different.

Most self-styled Christians try to understand that but get it wrong — some a little, some a lot … and some even found entire spinoff religions (like, say, Protestants) based on that sort of misunderstanding.

With their Western educations, the members of the Pakistani elite do what they can to pretend that they, and not the vast primitive masses of Pakistan, are the “real Pakistan.” In this respect, they are like all those ramrod-straight terry-thomas-moustachioed Pakistani generals who for decades fooled their American counterparts, carefully explaining that Islam was “a bulwark against Communism” and that they, therefore, were so much more deserving of American aid, especially military aid, than India. India, after all, was dominated by its New Left Book Club leader Jawaharlal Nehru and his marxisant, bandung-conferencing foreign minister, who even allowed the Soviets in to build steel mills and suchlike, Krishna Menon. And the Americans fell for it, and have been falling for that Pakistani line, or some variant on it, ever since — right up until the day before yesterday.

It was a brilliant simplification of an intractable problem. And Li didn’t just radically dumb down the difficulty of working out correlations; he decided not to even bother trying to map and calculate all the nearly infinite relationships between the various loans that made up a pool. What happens when the number of pool members increases or when you mix negative correlations with positive ones? Never mind all that, he said. The only thing that matters is the final correlation number—one clean, simple, all-sufficient figure that sums up everything.

The damage was foreseeable and, in fact, foreseen. In 1998, before Li had even invented his copula function, Paul Wilmott wrote that “the correlations between financial quantities are notoriously unstable.” Wilmott, a quantitative-finance consultant and lecturer, argued that no theory should be built on such unpredictable parameters. And he wasn’t alone. During the boom years, everybody could reel off reasons why the Gaussian copula function wasn’t perfect. Li’s approach made no allowance for unpredictability: It assumed that correlation was a constant rather than something mercurial. Investment banks would regularly phone Stanford’s Duffie and ask him to come in and talk to them about exactly what Li’s copula was. Every time, he would warn them that it was not suitable for use in risk management or valuation.

… the quants, who should have been more aware of the copula’s weaknesses, weren’t the ones making the big asset-allocation decisions. Their managers, who made the actual calls, lacked the math skills to understand what the models were doing or how they worked. They could, however, understand something as simple as a single correlation number. That was the problem.

It’s all the fault of Banker Barbie, for whom math is apparently too hard.

Like some sort of rulers of the universe, state lawmakers are considering restoring little Pluto’s planetary status, casting aside the scientific community’s 2006 decision downgrading the distant ice ball.

The push for a state decree on Pluto comes from state Sen. Gary Dahl, a Republican whose downstate district includes Streator, birthplace of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh. Dahl told colleagues Pluto is important to the local community, which considers the vote to downgrade Pluto to “dwarf” planet was unfair as it involved only 4 percent of the International Astronomical Union’s 10,000 scientists.

Jeez, even the Republicans in Illinois are idiots. There must be something in the water.

The Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Scranton (SSN 756) departed Naval Station Norfolk’s Pier 3, Feb. 20, as part of the Eisenhower Strike Group, with the entire crew wearing the newly released Navy working uniform.

Because, you know, it’s very important to have a CAMOUFLAGE UNIFORM when you’re ON A FARGIN SUBMARINE and you’re OUT AT SEA. You never know when some sonar operator will attempt to ambush you on the mess deck.

I know Barack Obama isn’t responsible for this travesty but I’m going to blame him anyway, because that’s the Spirit of the Times.

AGs send jackpot cases to the trial attorneys, who turn around and kick some of their contingency-fee winnings back to the AGs in campaign contributions. By outsourcing the work, Attorneys General can file more cases, raising their political profile. The lawyers, meanwhile, wield the power of the state and its publicity machine to force companies to settle.

Under the auspices of fighting crime and preventing terrorism, Chicago’s Police Superintendent Jody Weis is hyping CCTV as having “limitless” crime-fighting potential. The reality, as is evident to anyone who has actually researched this type of thing, is that studies have shown municipal surveillance cameras to have little to no positive effect on crime. Further, London is widely known to have the most extensive CCTV network in the world, but that served as little deterrent to the terrorists of July 2005. But instead of bringing this up, the Sun-Times and Chicago officials point to a test in which “live video was used to catch a petty thief in the act of sticking his hand in a Salvation Army kettle outside Macy’s State Street.” Given the cost in both dollars and civil liberties, it is hard to justify catching petty criminals stealing some coins from charity.

The stuff is a simple mixture of table salt and tap water whose ions have been scrambled with an electric current. Researchers have dubbed it electrolyzed water – hardly as catchy as Mr. Clean. But at the Sheraton Delfina in Santa Monica, some hotel workers are calling it el liquido milagroso – the miracle liquid.

That’s as good a name as any for a substance that scientists say is powerful enough to kill anthrax spores without harming people or the environment.

Good old ACORN is at it again. It’s not enough that they assisted in pressuring banks to lend to improvident homebuyers under the CRA, they’re now illegally trying to interfere with the recovery process.

One would have thought that engaging in voter fraud on behalf of the Democrat Party would have occupied all of their time. I guess they need a hobby, too.